Well I've been interested in the area of hacking for quite a while, after hearing people talk of it, seeing news reports of the larger hacks, and have begun fiddling about with Linux distros and the like (for instance, BackTrack).

However, I am completely new to the whole area of hacking, the reason I'm interested, is more for security reasons than to actually hack anyone (though pen testing my own machines could be interesting)... Obviously just knowing about hacking isn't going to make anyone any more secure, and I'm guessing that new exploits for everything are being created all the time, hence why I'm interested in the whole scene.

I have a lot of experience with windows (obviously), and as well as dabbling in *nix, have a decent knowledge of c++ (currently learning it, by no means very advanced stuff at the moment), and from other posts around this area it looks as if I'm going in the right direction.

Although it would be nice, a quick and easy "how to" guide isn't going to happen, but if a few people around here could point me to resources that'll get me on my way, in terms of learning about how hacks are performed, how to protect against them, etc, I'd be very grateful (Please note, I'm talking about penetration, not website hacking, not too interested in that).

I did read up on the Newbie assignment area, and will take a look through the resources there, but was wondering if there's any more help to be had than just in that topic? Oh, and excuse any phrases here which just sound stupid, I'm completely new to all this, and this seemed like a good place to ask around.

Well, "website hacking" is still hacking into a system; most exploits on websites are done to the point of gaining full access to a webserver (and in a lot of cases, people would hack the server itself to deface a site).

I guess my main question is to you; what exactly do you want to do?

My first suggestion to you would be to go read up on some security white-papers, go look at what is patched in a system (such as many of Microshaft's tuesday security updates), and go delve into what they patched and try to find how they patched it (and what was done that they had to patch). A lot of the time you won't be able to find much information on it, but a lot of the time you can find exactly what went on through a whitepaper.

White papers eh, I'll have to have a look at some, there any places you could recommend, or do I need to just look around?

My main idea of what I wanted to do was to be able to know how to break into Windows systems (NT based), either remotely or locally.

I've had a go for instance trying to find a way into a Vista system with local access (my own) without any password information etc, but have had no luck. The other side that I'm interested in is the remote access side, as I said before to protect against it, as far as you can, and I've had a look at a few old methods of how to gain entry to for instance, XP, but obviously these no longer work. For an example of something I'd be interested in doing, gaining access to a remote PC to plant files, possibly some sort of VNC app for remote control of said system.

You usually have to just look around; googling whitepaper can usually turn up quite a few things :P...

Well, you're not just going to be able to find some unsecure remote app running on someones system, most people don't have the need to install them in the first place, and most people are behind routers anymore so you've got the firewall in place...

Most of the time, you'll be looking at exploiting a flaw in the version of windows someone is running, thats where a whitepaper on a "fix" would come in...